Mary made fruitful by the word she heard

Mary made fruitful by the Word she heard

Mary conceived by believing and, to that end, by hearing (cf. Rom 10:17): from the Word that she heard arose the faith with which she begot Christ. In patristic symbolism, the conception of Christ is presented as an event that took place in Mary through the word of the Angel that penetrated her ear: “Death entered through the ear of Eve (cf. Gen 3:1-6), therefore life entered through the ear of Mary” (Ephrem, Diatessaron 4:15, 22.)

The curious formula that has run through the ages, conceptio per aurem, expresses well the fruitfulness of grace by virtue of the listening practiced by Mary, which gave rise to the devotion to Our Lady of the Ear. The Word of God penetrated her (Mary) through the ear, and the intimate nature of her body was sanctified. And at that same moment the pregnancy of the Virgin began:

“no one else was born except He who, having entered through the maternal ears, filled the womb of Mary”(Gaudentius of Brescia, Homily 9).

Listening therefore has a maternal quality: the passivity of conception and the phase of pregnancy that open onto the generative act, which also affects the pedagogical act, which, not surprisingly, has been thought of fundamentally as an act of generation and birth. Motherhood does not stop at the biological limit, but travels the territory of the formation of the one begotten.

Mary begets and educates by listening, so that the inner thread that unites the various dimensions and the various phases of motherhood is a fruitful listening. Or, put the other way around, the maternal fruitfulness of Mary is expressed on the generative and educative level through listening. 

Mary, as Mother, has a carnal-biological bond with the Son, for she carried the Son of God in her womb. As Virgin, she has a pedagogical-ethical-spiritual bond, because, with her faith, she always welcomed the word of God, keeping it in her heart and committing herself to penetrate its meanings, especially in their obscure sides.

The effect of this second bond that Mary has with Christ consists in the fact that not only the Son grows, but also the Mother: the listening of Mary to the Word is therefore the cause of the multidirectional expansion of her maternal experience toward the Son.

She lived her existence listening to the Word

The contemplative of Nazareth

The time of Nazareth cannot be thought of except as a beautiful and holy time that Mary lives listening in contemplation. Mary is a successful example of this spiritual experience which, more than one of the Christian spiritual experiences, is the very form of Christian life when it reaches the summit of interiority.

The contemplative, that is, the creature who listens to his God, seems to be a being immobilized by a passivating experience, but he is the most active person, because he is occupied with a wearying labor (which is the effort of pursuing all the evolutions of the spirit) and a very risky one (which is the undertaking of walking in the darkness of the night, of descending into the interior abysses, of climbing to the highest pinnacles of the cathedral of the soul and there casting oneself into a loving embrace with the Bridegroom or sustaining the arduous struggle with God).

The life of Mary in Nazareth reminds us that contemplation is one of the permanent Christian urgencies. For Mary, the contemplative experience in no way means an intimate withdrawal, but a constant discernment of what is essential. For this reason she also teaches us to place ourselves in a permanent search for what is most serious and decisive for our final destiny.

Daughter of a people characterized by listening to the Word

Mary feels herself part of a listening people, indeed, of a people of listening: “Hear, O Israel!” (Deut 6:4). For Mary, to believe coincided with listening, that is, with being of God: “whoever is of God hears the words of God” (Jn 8:47). Her high faith passes through a high, full, and radical listening to the word of God. Not knowing sin on any level, Mary immeasurably surpassed the threshold of the guilt of not listening, which constituted the greatest guilt for Israel (cf. Jer 7:13; Hos 9:17): it was a very pure listening, carried out with a circumcised heart and circumcised ears (cf. Jer 6:10; Acts 7:51).

A life spent listening to the Word

Those who believe are by essence the hearers of the Word, in fact “those who do the word and not only the hearers” (Jas 1:22). The listening to the Word on the part of Mary is a meditated and therefore theological listening: “And His mother kept all these things” (Lk 2:19, 51b).

She, as a woman of attentive and wise heart, remembers the history of salvation in its entirety, with the most careful exactness: hers is a dynamic, actualizing memory, which also calls us to remember, above all in the hour of trial. The Virgin of Listening as mother-disciple is particularly engaged in rethinking the scandal of the Passion. This important guardian of the Word was a precious reality for the first Church and is so for the Church of all times.

An existence punctuated by obedience to the Word.

The whole existence of the woman of Nazareth was marked by stages of listening that led to an ever greater elevation of her personality, in parallel with the growth of her intimacy with the trinitarian God and with the deepening of her participation in the trinitarian event of salvation. On the other hand, the nature of those same historical-existential stages lived by her also qualified the experience of her listening. Mary is the example of a liturgy of the Word that is continuous and innervated throughout her existence.

Let us see:

Mary, in believing, is a model for the Church of how the Word is:

, received (Annunciation).

, begotten (Nativity).

, presented to the world (Epiphany).

, kept within oneself (life of Nazareth).

, believed (Cana).

, spread abroad (Visitation).

, worthy of our trust to the utmost (Cross).

, witnessed (Pentecost).

Mary is the sublime daughter of Zion, the privileged and fulfilled part of a listening people.

As a result of this centuries-old educational action, Israel saw develop within itself a solid psychology of listening and a refined spirituality of listening, which Mary possessed in the most intense way. In the prophetic way, in a certain sense, she too prophesies, because she listened with her ears to the Lord of Hosts (cf. Is 5:9).

Mary is a teacher because she narrates in her life the mysteries of Christ and His beatitudes, and because she refers us to them, as to the most authoritative code of holiness, which Jesus placed at the summit of the Gospel, as the synthesis of values that are not only perennial, but precursors of eternal life.

The discourse on Mary, disciple of listening and teacher of life, therefore leads us to conclude with the person of Jesus and with His Gospel: a Marian discourse, in fact, is correct whenever it ends in a christological-trinitarian-pneumatological and ecclesial way.

To deepen the reflection on Mary made fruitful by the Word, consult the encyclical Redemptoris Mater by John Paul II, which contemplates how Mary, by listening to and welcoming the Word, became the mother of the incarnate Word.

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